ABC of Carbon Weekly Blog - A is for Awareness

With the help and support of fellow Change2 member and author Ken Hickson we are publishing on a weekly basis little snippets from his book the ABC of Carbon. Each week our editor will randomly select a article or reference from his book and publish it. Starting with A and then working through the alphabet.

We hope you enjoy these little bite sized snippets of information and every month till the end of 2010 we will give away a free copy for the best blog or comment posted.





A is for Awarness

Awareness. We have been aware of the link between the earth’s atmosphere and its climate since the 1890s. Swedish chemist Arrhenius first drew attention to this phenomenon, called the ‘greenhouse effect’. The scientist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, who was the chief economist for the National Coal Board in the UK, attracted worldwide notice with his book Small is beautiful in 1962, which alerted all to the harm coming from the increasing rate of burning fossil fuels. There was no effective measurement of this until the mid-1970s, but over the years, scientists of all persuasions studied the issue and attempted to persuade the world to take notice. In 1989, Professor Ian Lowe published the first edition of his book Living in the greenhouse, which discussed global warming. The Australian government science agency, CSIRO, has been researching and reporting on the greenhouse effect for more than twenty years, including organising the first Greenhouse conference in Australia in 1987. But awareness of climate change, as the world’s most pressing issue, only really came to a head through three significant events in 2006 and early 2007 that the global media could not ignore — the release of the report, the Stern review on the economics of climate change, in October 2006 by UK economist Nicholas Stern; the screening of An inconvenient truth,the documentary by Al Gore, which won Academy Awards early in 2007; and the release of the long-awaited Fourth assessment report by the IPCC in February 2007.